I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. But the dynamics of pandemic voting have totally upended number-counters’ ability to make sense of the results. In a way it doesn’t matter. In most cases, it doesn’t really matter if there are premature predictions. The results will be what they are. But it is continuing to create all sorts of seesaw, roller-coastering results and non-results, results that turn out not to be results. Ohio and North Carolina were looking good for Democrats until they weren’t. But now North Carolina looks at least a bit less than certain again. For reasons I didn’t quite understand people were giving Trump Georgia — but without waiting for the big cities and especially Atlanta to report. Now Georgia’s back up in the air. Fox News called Arizona for Biden but no one else has followed them. Now that seems less than certain. It’s all over the place. I stick to what I said: patience, count the votes, I’m very cautiously optimistic.
Folks, it’s been a bruising, bruising evening so far. What looked like a possible Biden blowout is certainly not turning out that way. It seems like Florida, Texas and probably North Carolina are all going to President Trump. It feels a lot like 2016. But I want to stress that in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, most of the Democratic votes don’t seem to have been counted yet. At least the particular counties I’m seeing make it look like Biden is in a good position to win these three states. Outside of the Southeast there are many counties across the country where Biden has improved the margins over Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile Biden appears to be winning Arizona, though that’s not quite certain yet.
JoinI’ve mentioned this a few times. I will once more. In elections like this when all the motion seems to be in one direction, when the margins are fairly large, when one side’s strongholds are suddenly in contention the party with what looks like the lead tends to over-perform. ‘Tends’ … so tends to happen more frequently than not except when it doesn’t, which is a decent amount of the time. This is what I would say, based on experience and history, if I were indifferent to the outcome and not deeply scarred, as so many are, by the experience of 2016. We saw this in 1980. We saw it in 2008.
The most outrageous moves by the Trump administration are really hard to pinpoint or track or even rank at this point. But of course, today, on this most important, historic day, he’s pulling one of his most brazen stunts yet.
Join
A regular TPM reader emails in today with her account of assisting her elderly mother with voting. It’s not an extraordinary story. That’s what makes it’s so annoying. It’s just one hurdle after another, many of them caused by the pandemic, that would deter all but the most committed from voting. It shouldn’t be this way. But it reflects a system where universal voting isn’t the ideal, the goal, or the lodestar.
JoinHi you all, I wrote to you a few months ago about my experience working in a grocery store during the pandemic. Now I’d like to share with you my experience trying to help my mother vote in this election.
I wanted to give you brief preview of our plan for the day, which I hope you’ll stay here with us for till the early hours. As usual, starting with the close of the polls we’ll be bringing you live election results for all federal races plus gubernatorial races around the United States. (The maps and boards will likely go up mid-late-afternoon. You can bookmark them then.)
Our team will be with you here all day and all night. We’re ready for this big day and whatever comes after it. Here’s our live blog for this big day. We’ll likely also be sprinkling in some mini-podcast episodes as news dictates. So keep an eye out for that too, likely latter in the evening but, again, depending on the news.
If you want to watch the number crunching experts who I follow on election nights to know what’s happening and seem smart, you can find them here. This is a group chosen to focus on data and what it means in real time – not commentary or opinion or analysis. Just what does it mean that these counties are left, is this race over or not, what does the pattern of returns mean. These folks know as well as it can be.
Our team will of course be active on our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
As we begin this big, perhaps seemingly endless day, I wanted to thank all our subscribers, more than 34,000 of you. I’m really proud of the job this team has done all year. It’s been a grueling political cycle, compounded by a global pandemic that has had us out of our offices and working remotely since early March. But a through line of consistency we’ve had throughout is a relative financial stability. That’s allowed all of us to keep our heads down and bring you the news. And that is entirely because of you, our subscribers. This isn’t any lofty hocum of ‘we couldn’t have done it without you’. We very literally could not have done any of this without you: your subscription fees make up about three-quarters of our revenue. That support not only makes what we do possible. It also gives us some breathing room and predictability to look a bit over the horizon, to be more creative about how we can improve, how we can up our game. So thanks.
A few thoughts again seriatim, in no particular order.
JoinPeople, Steve Schale is the Democratic campaign guy I trust more than anyone else to tell me what’s happening on the ground in Florida, how to understand the polls, the turnout data, the results as they come in tomorrow evening. It was Schale looking at the returns in real time and commenting on them on Twitter four years ago that told me something bad was happening. Here’s his final rundown for this cycle on what he’s seeing in his home state.